November 15, 2024
Teri Palmer had never been one for knick-knacks. Her little two-bedroom house in Albany was spare, nearly ascetic. A few framed photos on the wall, a couple of mugs she’d had since college, and a secondhand armchair she’d picked up when she first moved in. She kept things simple. Orderly. No space for anything extra in her life or her home.
So, when she found the box sitting on her doorstep that Friday, she was certain it had to be a mistake. It was the size of a small shoebox, plain brown cardboard with no return address, no markings to indicate where it had come from. But her name was there, clear as day, written in an old-fashioned script that made her uneasy in a way she couldn’t quite name.
“Some promo thing,” she muttered to herself, shrugging. She took it inside, set it on the counter, and sliced it open with her keys. Inside was a layer of yellowed tissue paper, which crinkled unpleasantly as she peeled it back, revealing…a porcelain statue. A young boy, painted with an odd, almost ghostly pale blue skin, cradling a goat in his arms. The boy had a strange, sad expression, and the goat’s eyes were a vivid, unnatural red.
Teri stared at the statue, feeling a prickling discomfort rise in her gut. This wasn’t just something she’d never buy—it was the sort of thing she wouldn’t even have picked up in a thrift store. But the whole thing made no sense. She hadn’t ordered it. Who would’ve sent it? And why?
She put the box back together and shoved it in a drawer, not sure why she couldn’t just throw it out. For the next few hours, she tried to forget about it, even as unease lingered like a low hum in the back of her mind.
The next morning, she was barely awake, padding down the hallway to get her morning coffee when she spotted it: a small, brown box on the doorstep. The same plain cardboard. The same old-fashioned lettering. She froze, her pulse skittering. It couldn’t be…
But it was. She tore it open with shaking hands, uncovering the same tissue paper, the same eerie, porcelain boy holding his little goat.
In a daze, she ran to the drawer. It was empty.
Her stomach dropped, and a flicker of fear pulsed through her as she picked up the box and dropped it straight into her trash bin, burying it under coffee grounds and yesterday’s leftovers. She slammed the lid down and locked up tight that night, double-checking the doors and windows.
Sunday morning, there it was again: the same brown box, perched innocently on her doorstep like a stray cat waiting to be let in. Teri’s skin crawled as she stared down at it, her pulse pounding. Whoever was doing this had to be playing a sick joke. Or maybe—maybe someone had come into her house.
She picked it up, holding it at arm’s length as she paced her small living room, every thought jumbled and frantic. After a deep breath, she drove to the post office, her fingers trembling as she entered and approached the woman at the counter. “Is there any way to track down where a package came from?” she asked the woman, her voice strained.
The woman was patient but unhelpful, explaining that it looked like any other package left by the postal service, even if it did seem…oddly dated. “As if it was sent 80 years ago or more,” the woman said lightly, chuckling as though it were nothing. Teri managed a thank you and rushed out.
She looked again at the statue and let herself seethe. “You want to come back? Fine.” She grabbed a hammer from her tool drawer and smashed the figure into jagged bits, letting the shattered shards fall back into the box. It made her feel better. A little more in control.
That night, she lay awake, staring at the dark ceiling, her thoughts tangled in the memory of the statue’s strange expression, the goat’s red eyes. She drifted off just before dawn, but the peace was short-lived. She woke up to the sound of a soft thump at her door. Bleary-eyed and aching, she dragged herself to the entryway—and there it was. Intact, perfectly whole, staring back at her with that sad little face, that unsettling goat with eyes that seemed to look straight through her.
By Monday afternoon, she was frantic, scouring the internet for any mention of the statue. After hours of searching, she found it: a single reference on an obscure art forum, dating back to the early 1900s. The piece was attributed to an artist named Albert Pennbrooke, who, as it turned out, had died penniless after a larger company stole his designs, forcing him into a long, fruitless battle to reclaim them. A line in the forum caught her eye: “Pennbrooke cursed his creations, vowing they’d haunt anyone linked to the family who’d wronged him.”
A sick realization settled in her gut. Her own family had once owned the company that destroyed him, a fact she knew only because her mother occasionally mentioned it as family trivia, like something to be proud of. She dialed her mother without thinking, spilling everything—the packages, the statues, the old artist who’d somehow cursed her family a century ago.
Her mother paused, and for a moment Teri thought she’d laugh it off, but she only sighed. “Your grandmother used to say something similar happened to her when she was younger, things disappearing, strange sounds. Nothing went right for the family until we sold that business. We all thought she was crazy.”
After hanging up, Teri shivered, pulling her knees to her chest, and glanced across the room at the statue, now perched on a high shelf like it was watching her.
In desperation, she listed the statue online, selling it for $1 to a buyer in Salt Lake City, free shipping, just to rid herself of it. She shipped it that same day, sealing the box tightly. That night, she dreamed of the little boy’s laughter, but when she woke up, there was nothing on her doorstep. No laughter. No goat sounds. She felt a weight lift, life returned to normal—no more statues, no strange sounds. She felt like she’d finally, somehow, beat the curse.
But a week later, her email pinged with a new message.
The buyer had written: The box was empty when it arrived. Could you resend the statue, or issue a refund?
The room seemed to constrict around her as she read, her throat tightening with something dark and icy. Just then, a soft, mocking laugh echoed through the house—a child’s laugh, close to her ear, followed by the long, mournful bleat of a goat.
As her heart hammered and the sounds grew louder, her mind spiraled, realizing she could never be rid of it.
The laughter, the goat’s scream…they would haunt her forever.
0 Comments